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4 Steps to Optimize Your Drupal Site, Increase Traffic

I recently used acquia.com to demonstrate how to increase site traffic on a Drupal website by improving the online marketing. This conversation made me think that I could share some of the key things I do on acquia.com with other Drupal site managers. For starters, SEO, or search engine optimization, is a huge focus for me and there are some great tools in Drupal to help with this.

Step 2:
Now, for a bit more work. I’ve listed out the top 5 modules I suggest putting on your website to help with SEO.

Global RedirectThis modules does a bunch of things but the important features are that it checks for multiple aliases for 1 URL and 301 redirects them to the correct URL. Drupal by default does not remove the old or original path if you create an alias which can cause duplicate content in search engines and negatively effect your SEO efforts.

Page titleThis module gives you granular control of your browser page title to enhance your ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages) and help your SEO because you will be using rich keywords in those page titles.

Meta tags quick (Drupal 7) or Nodewords (Drupal 6) The great thing about Drupal is there are many ways to do the same thing, so pick the one that works best for you. I personally like nodewords and meta tags quick as my meta keywords, meta descriptions and canonical tags module. If you go do Drupal.org and search meta data, you will find many others. Pick the one that you like best. This is just a way to get your meta descriptions on your pages.

Path autoThis module automatically generates your page URLs based on content you define. For example, you can pick a content type of blog to always have the URL /blog/[blog title] . This way the user doesn’t have to manually specify a path alias. And if you give your content keyword rich titles, your URLs will also contain those high ranking terms to improve your SEO.

XML SitemapThis module creates an XML sitemap for search engines to easily find and index pages on your site. This module also allows for you to submit your sitemap to popular search engines.

There are of course many more modules you can add and once you’ve set these up and configured them you may have need for more. A great tool that I use on acquia.com to check what other modules I could be running to help improve SEO is the SEO Grader tool within Acquia Insight.

Step 3:
Now that you have all the base modules for SEO, my suggestion would be to define your targeted keyword list. Update: The Google keyword planner shows the number of searches for a specific term. This can tell you if there is any traffic potential from that keyword if you are able to rank for it.

Google Trends – Allows you to see how a keyword has done over the years.

WordTracker – Provides dozens of tools to help you find the best keywords.

WebCEO – This software has tools for reporting, site audits, keyword research and link building. They have a free version and a paid version. Best for a DIY team.

Once you have used the keyword tools, you should have a list of keywords that will be the focus of your SEO campaign.

Step 4:
Map your targeted keywords to specific pages. This will give you a better chance to rank for those key terms. Each page should have 1 or 2 targeting keywords. Once your keyword mapping process is done, write page descriptions for each of those targeted pages containing those keywords; create or update page titles in your page title module field; and be sure to update page content to include those targeted keywords.

Search engine algorithms change all the time so you’ll want to make sure you have some type of analytics software enabled to watch your keyword trends and your organic site traffic.

With this being my first blog post, I should probably introduce myself, my name is Kate Fogarty and I am the web manager for acquia.com. I have been using Drupal for the past 5 years and bring an interesting mix of design, development and marketing to the marketing team. Listen to my podcast to learn more about me!

Good advice to start getting A+'s in the free insight scan tool. I
would also add the schema.org module (http://drupal.org/project/s
chemaorg) that enables rich snippets in your site and always
enable clean urls and domain canonicalization.

Nodewords was not yet upgraded to D7 (Metatags) version when we
needed to implement this, so we went with metatags_quick. It does
everything we need it to, so we don't feel we're missing out on
anything - yet ;)

Katelyn Fogarty, I read your post,, really great work...But one
considerable matter is that you told here to analyses keyword with
Google Adwords keyword tool, when i search this tool in Google, they
show me Google keyword Planner instead of Google Adwords keyword
tool.. In many post in internet i saw this matter,, they suggested
Google Adwords keyword tool,, but it has no existence... I want to
know more about it...please help me..

First, let me say that the info in this article is right on the
money for any website, not just Drupal (expect for specific Drupal
tools mentioned). There seems to be a lot of question about meta tags
and to be honest, no one needs a program to make those. That is one of
the easiest things to write because you can simply copy one that
already exists, save it and change the info as needed for yourself and
paste it in your site. There is no real need for any software and most
of them just want to get their name in your site code so that search
engines will see it. Just my opinion of course.

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